March 29, 2008

Modesty, hod-carrying, everything but relevance

Interesting to see my friends Mark Liberman and Stephen Jones arguing
about whether James Kilpatrick's
recent
article
makes good points. I was already
planning to comment on my own reaction to
the article: I was astounded by its sheer rambling
emptiness; it was far worse than I was expecting.

Kilpatrick had a very clear mandate:
he had been asked Why do we study grammar? by a first-year high
school student in Oregon named Kathryn. Her question
does need an
answer. Kilpatrick was apparently intending to provide one. But instead
he just sort of staggers about for six hundred words and then falls over
and stops. Neither Mark nor Stephen has given you a proper sense of how
bad the article is.

Kilpatrick's first point is that using proper grammar is like not
driving into downtown Portland wearing a polka-dot bikini. (I swear
I am not making this up.) The girl who wore the itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny
yellow polka dot bikini in the song (it was a hit back in 1960;
Kilpatrick was apparently 40 by then, and should not have even
been listening to such songs)
was embarrassed at having to come out of the water.
Grammar is modesty, Kathryn. Cover your midriff.

He then moves to some condescending comments
about the working-class speech of an imagined
"hod carrier" who "don't speak no good English"
but "pays the rent and,
you know, it's like he treats his wife real good".
He concedes that the
hod carrier might do a good job of work, but... I don't know.
I cannot see what that
paragraph is supposed to be driving at.
It goes nowhere as far as the topic
of motivating grammatical study is concerned.

Next he says that the point of grammar is "to avoid being
misunderstood", and drifts from there
into what seems a glaringly irrelevant
remark about vocabulary size ("a hundred thousand words for everyday use and
half a million more for special occasions"), and tries to make it relevant
by declaring that "we can put these riches to work" with grammar.
Otherwise will be unable to write precise laws, persuasive sermons, or clear doll's house assembly instructions. (By the way, everything
I've assembled recently has instructions that are entirely
pictorial. So much for grammar.)
This is the misguided view that Mark convincingly calls
"transparent
nonsense". It's about getting a message across effectively,
and not about studying grammar.

Struggling to get back to his theme, Kilpatrick declares
(getting somewhat desperate) that one reason for studying
grammar is that "it is
surely more fun than algebra."
Apparently "once you've done one quadratic
equation, you've done them all" (!). But drift sets in again,
leading him to remark that "there are few
ironclad 'rules' of English composition"
— which apparently means there isn't much to study, undercutting his
whole point.

His remaining statements are these:
First, that he is not a snob, he is merely
practical (this is about himself rather than grammatical study).

Second, that English grammar "has its awkward
patches" but nonetheless "is a language of
remarkably good order" (I do
not see what these impressionistic
value judgments have to do with his topic).

Third,
that "irregular verbs have a pattern of irregularity" and this is exemplified
by comparing Kathryn has and Kathryn had (they provide "a
perfect, or at least a past perfect example", he says, bafflingly).

And fourth, in a concluding explosion of anglophone
triumphalism, that "English is the greatest language ever
devised for communicating thought" — the remark that Mark
commented
on originally, which has nothing to do with why we might
or should study grammar.

And there, having hit the 600-word point without having
made a single sensible remark about why we study grammar, he simply stops.

Steve says the article "is actually rather good",
and even Mark says
"Kilpatrick writes beautifully"; but I demur.
I think Kilpatrick's little piece
may be the worst piece of writing about language
that I've ever seen.
And the question it starts with — why we study grammar
— remains to be addressed. I may have to tackle the
question myself one day, because James Kilpatrick
clearly has nothing to say about it.